Harold Pinter said, “The more acute the experience, the less articulate the expression.” I’ve been going back over my notes of my very early days in Australia. The love wife had gone crazy and I was on my own, dead broke. I serviced a paraplegic woman for money—and it was strange because she was so kind. A powerful woman, just broken, and I was young. I’d met her in a church I’d gone into by chance—to pray when I was lost and confused. She gave me $1,000 (a lot of money then) and got me back on my feet. I later sent her a mask from the Sepik River in PNG. My favorite Australian writer Randolph Stowe speaks of “terrors and wonders”—and that’s what those days were filled with. Once I was driving from South Australia west across the endless empty plane, and I drove for an hour on the wrong side of the road, thinking I was back in America. I stopped to have a piss and noticed a recently dead rabbit, bees glued to its eyes. Out of nowhere a white man appeared with an old horse pistol. He said very simply, “I came out here to kill myself, but I can’t do it. My car’s stuck in the sand over there. Would you give me ride?” He looked crazy with stress and had a gun. We were miles from anywhere. The rental car I was driving had a cassette deck and a Carly Simon tape stuck in it. I said yes. “Leave the gun.”
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 01:41:45 +0000
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